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Do You Have the Correct Sheep Sorrel?Answered by: Richters StaffQuestion from: Peggy Leaper Posted: Before April 1998

I just received your catalogue this week and was greatly impressed, you have a good assortment of herbs including some of the rarer ones. As soon I get a chance I will be placing an order with for seeds and plants. One item that interested me in particular was the sheep sorrel. I have been trying to buy genuine sheep sorrel for a few months now and of three supposedly reputable herb stores I have yet to get the right thing. Usually they send yellow dock or garden sorrel. The reason I want to be sure of getting sheep sorrel is that my sister-in-law has colon cancer and we have been making her Essiac and it has helped her a lot, she feels strong and is able to do everything she normally did and has a real feeling of well being. I do not want any substitutes. This past summer I picked sheep sorrel myself and I know what it looks and tastes like so I know when they are selling me the wrong thing, some have told me that it has a lemony taste, but this is not sheep sorrel, it is yellow dock that is lemony. Sheep sorrel has a sour taste, that’s why it is sometimes called sour grass. We have a lot of sheep sorrel around here and would have picked more had we known we were going to need so much of it. So if you are sure that what you have is Sheep Sorrel could please let me know and I will order some with the rest of my order, as I am running out of the sheep sorrel that I picked myself.

We can confirm that much of the ‘sheep sorrel’ available on the market is in fact dock or garden sorrel. We tested samples of dried herbs from several large dried herb companies and found serious problems with adulteration. One company insisted that their product was ‘certified’ by a German supplier to be sheep sorrel, but we could tell from the seeds we found in the lot and from the thickness of the stems that the material was not sheep sorrel.

Because the demand for sheep sorrel exploded due to the popularity of Essiac(R) the temptation to adulterate or substitute has been great. Further, sheep sorrel is a small plant that is costly to harvest while garden sorrel and dock are taller, much larger, and more importantly much cheaper to grow and harvest.

We can confirm that our dried sheep sorrel is the right stuff. It is more expensive because sheep sorrel is more costly to grow and harvest, but if you are making your own anti-cancer remedies then you want to be sure that you have the right material called for in the recipe.

[Essiac is a registered trademark of the Resperin Corporation, Ottawa, Canada]